From Anarchism to Addiction: Imaginations of Social Reform in Catalonia, Spain

Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, and continuing under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, ideologies of social reform were anchored by efforts to establish the criminal insanity of dissident anarchist and communist groups, particularly Catalans. After the fall of the regime, Catalonia assumed control of its prisons and instituted programs of treatment and rehabilitation for inmates. This paper contrasts psychiatric research conducted in labor camps during the 1930s and 1940s with ethnographic research examining behaviorist treatment models currently used in Catalan prisons. It questions how the work of curating and managing inmates' violent pasts and emotions is both enabled and limited by re-imaginations of mental 'reform' and conceptions of economic behavior in post-dictatorship Spain.